The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
Various steps discussed in this section and throughout this application may be performed by either database administrators or database users. This application does not attempt to differentiate between the two types of individuals. Therefore, any step said to be performed by either a “user” or “administrator” may also be performed by both a user and an administrator. Furthermore, many of the steps that are said to be performed by a user or administrator may also be performed by database application programmed by a user or administrator, while any step said to be performed by a database application may also be performed manually by a user or administrator.